In this exclusive video in partnership with Agile Business Conference, Timm Urschinger (Entrepreneur and CEO) discusses ‘Self-Set Salaries and How It Transformed Me as a Leader’.
In this presentation, Timm discusses his experience trying to move organisations from typical command-and-control environments you see in organisations today. Timm explores how companies can run in a self-organised manner, without all the management meetings, rigid structures based on power and with a more human approach to leadership and people management. Timm provides insights from his personal experience, along the following lines:
The problem with it is that I quite like to be in control, I am kind of a control freak. So I (at least partly) underestimated that this new setup would require me personally to change and develop quite a bit. In 2017 we were still only 4 people in the company. The salary discussions were quite straight-forward and we just discussed it all together, with the 8 people that we were at the end of 2018, as we needed a new approach to salaries and wanted it to be scalable as well. So we decided, in the best sense of a self-organized company, that we would go for self-set salaries. Everyone would set their personal salary for themselves.
I would like to share with you what happened …
Bio
I am a husband, father (7-month-old daughter), friend, maker and entrepreneur. I am only 31 years old, but hopefully have some inspiring stories to share already.
Quite a while back I studied business administration and informatics, no one really talked about agility at that time and certainly, nothing was taught in university.
I then worked for Big Pharma in Germany, Switzerland and China before I joined a consultancy where I quickly moved up the ladder, became the youngest team lead in the company (having the oldest employee in the company reporting to me, great experience!), was responsible to build and develop a new business area, lead the biggest account we had and so after all was responsible for 70 people in the account, 50% of the revenue and had a direct line of 10 people with a salary that was in the top 5% in Switzerland – which is exactly when I quit.
People thought I was completely crazy (and/or stupid…) and I probably was.
A few months later together with a friend I started another consultancy, LIVEsciences, where we thought we’d do everything better and different of course. We set the company up in a self-organized (Teal) setup, which means no org charts, not boxes, no line management.
Last year we also started LIVEventures, which is a venture capital company investing in medical innovation.
My passion certainly is making the workplace more fun, but also be a little puzzle piece in fixing our broken professional world – not only for the people, but also for our planet and how we can live here sustainably.
